In Apple's earnings call today, it became a little more obvious why iPhone user disgust over AT&T's network has become so much more prevalent: because there are 700% more iPhones out there to complain about.

In addition to Apple's near record-breaking Mac sales last quarter, iPhone sales jumped an astronomical 736% over last year. In the third quarter in 2008, Apple sold 717,000 iPhones for a total of $419 million; this year it sold 5.2 million and pulled down $1.6 billion in total iPhone revenue.

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Apple has posted its earnings for the third quarter of the 2009 fiscal year, which amounted (once again) to the best non-holiday quarter in Apple's history. The company's revenue grew 12% over last year to a total of $8.34 billion, with a net profit of $1.23 billion.

During the quarter, Apple saw record-setting adoption of Macs and iPhones by consumers, thanks in large part to the price cuts on the lower end of both lines. Wall Street anticipated a 3% contraction in Mac sales, but the company actually grew by 4% over last year, with a surge in sales taking place after the WWDC price cut announcements. During the quarter, 2.6 million Macs were sold, nearly meeting the company's all-time quarterly sales record.

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In an announcement late Tuesday afternoon, Microsoft product evangelist Brandon LeBlanc did not reveal the precise date in which Windows 7 would release to manufacturing. He did state, however, that the first availability of the final code will come Thursday, August 6, for independent software and hardware vendors, and also for MSDN and TechNet subscribers (English language version only).

Volume license customers will be next to see availability the following day, if they subscribe to Software Assurance (SA), said LeBlanc. Those without an SA license must wait until September 1 to download their copies.

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The Pirate Bay's $7.8 million acquisition by Swedish software company Global Gaming Factory could fall through after all, reports are now saying.

When the acquisition was announced in late May, Global Gaming Factory said it intended to re-launch the Pirate Bay under new business models "that allow compensation to the content providers and copyright owners." Last week, a little more depth was given to the Pirate Bay's potential revenue model by former Grokster CEO Wayne Rosso, who called it the "Resource Supported Model."

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Microsoft's scaling back of its social media initiatives continues, with the news today first reported by paidContent.org, learned during an interview with Corporate Vice President Erik Jorgensen, that MSN Video's Soapbox service will be shutting down completely. Soapbox has been its portal for user-submitted videos, but Jorgensen indicated to Fried that sponsorship for those videos -- which constituted about 5% of MSN Video's content portfolio -- was too low for the service to be sustained in the present economy.

In an interview with CNET's Ina Fried last month, Jorgensen stated then his team's intentions to scale back Soapbox, though he was careful at that time not to reveal the extent. The paidContent.org interview indicates that user-generated content may still be feasible on a revised MSN Video service, or whatever it should be called, although Microsoft is unlikely to give that content its own portal.

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The iPhone crowd has turned into an anti-AT&T mob. Spend 30 seconds on Twitter or perform even the most basic search for iPhone and AT&T information and you're sure to run into some serious rancor from disgusted iPhone users across the country. While the exclusive partnership between Cupertino and the Dallas teleco has never been perfect, user hostility has lately been at a fevered pitch.

In February of this year, prominent blogger Om Malik announced he was "breaking up" with his iPhone. "I love my iPhone -- but AT&T's network has failed me. Apparently I'm not alone. If you follow me on Twitter, then you know how often I complain about it; my complaints always result in me receiving similar messages of frustration from other iPhone users. A status update on my Facebook page on the topic unleashed a flood of messages from people expressing abhorrence of AT&T's service."

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While some are still sounding the trumpets over Google's proclamation that its Chrome Web browser technology will be elevated to the role of operating system sometime next year, there are some Web applications engineers who wonder why it isn't one already. Once Chrome 3 is proclaimed fully functional on Linux, it will essentially make the same Web applications accessible from the desktop that Chrome OS plans to do. And if you don't mind the fact that the Chrome 3 Web browser is in the development stage, whether you're running Linux or Windows XP on your netbook, it does that right now.

Though I've made the point before that most businesses and a majority of consumers today still prefer Microsoft Office, there will be a small, though potentially beneficial, market of consumers who appreciate the flexibility and versatility that a Web application may offer. If they can suffer through the bugs, users will have the opportunity to produce some respectable, if not altogether spectacular, documents. But what is there for users to gain by installing these Web apps on their desktops, and use them like software installed on their computers, as opposed to simply running them in their browsers?

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Right on schedule, the latest Clear WiMAX network has launched, bringing 4G wireless coverage to 638 square miles of Sin City. Clearwire detailed its plans for Summer launches in Atlanta and Las Vegas in early May. Today, Clearwire recapitulated its goal to have more than 80 markets covered by the end of 2010, which will include Chicago, Charlotte, Dallas/Fort Worth, Honolulu, Philadelphia, and Seattle before 2009 is out. Networks planned in 2010 include New York, Boston, Washington DC, Houston, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Coverage in Las Vegas is provided from more than 300 Motorola access points throughout the city and blankets an area with about 1.7 million residents, which balloons by more than 100,000 every January when CES rolls around.

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The most vivid headline on yesterday's news that Microsoft is releasing various Linux kernel modules under the GNU Public License may not have been the most accurate. That would be InfoWorld's "Linux slips into Microsoft's warm, deadly embrace," which cast an agreeable horror-movie glow over the proceedings.

Fun stuff, but despite Randall C. Kennedy's fine and impassioned argument that this is all an embrace-and-extend plot to allow Hyper-V to feast on the blood of the open-source movement, that's probably not where things are heading.

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Yahoo begins beta rollout of new front page

Tuesday, July 21, 2009 • After what feels like a Google-length testing period, Yahoo is rolling out access to its fresh-and-widgety front page redesign to US users, to be followed within a week or thereabouts with rollouts in the UK, France, and India. The design features a configurable "my favorites" bar with several dozen applications that can fly out and preview content above the main screen, improved localization, slightly smaller type, and the ubiquitous purple.

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It's an odd time to launch an e-bookstore, in the wake of Amazon's Orwellian book-deletion shenanigans as we are, but Barnes & Noble is jumping in with both feet. The new Barnes & Noble eBookstore launched Monday with over 700,000 titles, leapfrogging it past Amazon's efforts.

The store allows downloads to readers for the iPhone/iPod Touch and the BlackBerry, along with Windows and Mac machines; whatever the reader, it's optimized to the .pdb and .prc file formats. (The readers are free and come with free books -- including, if you register, a Merriam-Webster dictionary, plus access to half a million public-domain books from Google.)

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Adobe Systems has made two new frameworks available on opensource.adobe.com under the Mozilla Public License: Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) and Text Layout Framework (TLF),

OSMF was originally part of the Strobe initiative announced in back in May, which aimed to establish an open standard for custom Flash-based media players. It includes a plug-ins API that allows for third-party advertising and reporting metrics to work alongside the standard video player features such as buffering, dynamic streaming, and video navigation.

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If you look at Texas Instruments' year-over-year results -- ouch, down 27%. If you look at the numbers sequentially -- hey, up 18%, breaking a five-quarter slide. So, based on what we've all been through over the last year, what would you make of TI's numbers?

Texas Instruments took an optimistic but cautious tone on its earnings call, announcing net earnings of $260 million and an EPS of 20 cents, beating expectations. In addition, the company set forth its first predictions for Q3: revenue of between $2.5 and $2.8 billion, with earnings per share of between 29 and 39 cents.

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Fourteen months after the previous service pack (and six months after giving the world a peek at Macworld), Microsoft on Monday rolled out Office 2008 for Mac SP2. There's still no sign of the promised Entourage upgrade to Exchange Web Services (EWS), but fans of Office Live Workspace and SharePoint ought to be pleased.

Document Connection, which improves users' ability to work with documents on both of those collaboration platforms, is perhaps the biggest addition in SP2. It engendered not only a major effort to bring Microsoft's current vision of Web-based collaboration into the Mac world, but a push to get Office right with Safari 4. Those improvements are also part of SP2.

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Major US telecommunications company Qwest Communications today launched its highest speed DSL Internet service, based on the VDSL2 standard and promising maximum downstream speeds up to 40 Mbps and upstream speeds of 20 Mbps.

The service is available today in Denver, Tucson, Salt Lake City, and The Twin Cities, and the company says it will continue to roll out the VDSL2 technology in 23 more markets in such states as New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington.

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